June 4, 2020 Show with Thomas Parr on “Backdrop for a Glorious Gospel: The Covenant of Works According to William Strong”

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carwile, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you the listener with your own questions.

And now here's your host Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio wishing you all a happy Thursday on this fourth day of June 2020.

And I am thrilled to have as a first time guest today Thomas Parr, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Anacortes, Washington, which is a reformed

Baptist congregation. He's also contributing editor to the Lexham Context Commentary and author of the volume on the

Gospel of Mark in that series. Today we are going to be addressing his book, Backdrop for a

Glorious Gospel, the Covenant of Works according to William Strong. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Thomas Parr.

It's great to be with you, Chris. And I'm going to give our email address out right away for our listeners if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own.

Our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com c h r i s a r n z e n at gmail .com.

Please give us at least your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Let's say a issue of theology comes up that you are having a bone of contention over it with your own pastor and you don't want to draw attention to your identity, obviously, that would be a good reason to be anonymous.

You might even be a pastor who's in disagreement with your fellow elders over something we bring up or your denomination.

Well, obviously being anonymous is a good idea. But if it's not a personal and private issue, please give us at least your first name, city and state, and country of residence.

Before we go into your personal testimony of salvation, because whenever we have a first time guest on this show, we like them to give a summary of their salvation story, including the religious atmosphere they were raised in, if any, and what our sovereign

Lord raised up in their lives in regard to matters of providence that drew my guests to Christ and saved them.

But before we do that, tell our listeners about Cornerstone Baptist Church in Anacortes, Washington.

Sure. I moved out to Anacortes in 2006, August, in fact, so almost 14 years now, and planted a church here.

So it's a church plant. And we started out with about maybe three families in the church.

They didn't have a church that they felt they could attend in town. They asked me to come. So I came, started the church.

It's grown to maybe 25 families. So it's a smaller town. It's about 20 ,000 people. So I'm pretty happy with that growth.

Although, of course, you don't judge a church by the number of people that comes. But just so thankful for how the

Lord is blessed, and so thankful that I've had the incredible privilege of being able to preach the

Word and reform theology to the people here. Well, praise

God. And for anybody who wants to look up more information about Cornerstone Baptist Church of Anacortes, Washington, you can go to cornerstoneanacortes .com.

And Anacortes is spelt A -N -A -C -O -R -T -E -S. cornerstoneanacortes .com.

And hopefully we'll remember to repeat that later. Well, now let's move on to a summary of your salvation testimony.

Sure. So I was saved in 1992. I was about 22 years old.

And I, you know, so I was an adult when I became a Christian. I had been raised in a

Christian home. We lived in rural Idaho. So talk about the backwater of the backwaters.

And we were raised in just community churches, little Baptist churches where they weren't affiliated, really.

Kind of just little independent churches there. And I'd heard the gospel about Christ. I'd heard it pretty much my whole life.

And I just didn't want it when I was a teenager. I don't think I could have been honest when I was a teenager.

If somebody had asked me, why don't you want Christ? I would have said I had him already, you know, because I was flying under the radar and I was trying to appear good to all the people that I knew.

But I know now that I didn't want Christ at the time. And I didn't want to believe the gospel because I knew that if I put my faith in Christ and his death on the cross for me, that then

I would be bound to love him and serve him. And I simply didn't want to do what he says to do.

I wanted my freedom. And so I pursued that throughout my teenage years and all the things that typically go along with it.

A lot of evil. But when I was 18,

I went through kind of a self -reformation where I didn't like the direction my life was headed.

So I changed my ways kind of on my own strength. And so it's funny because throughout most of my teenage years, it was just follow the ways of the world.

And then beginning at age 18, it was, okay, now let's be honorable. And both ways without Christ are vain.

Vanity of vanity. All is vanity. And I really sensed that when I was 22 and just came to a point where I felt wretched in my sin and like I'd been running from God my whole life.

And whether I was, you know, wallowing in sin or whether I was trying to posture and make myself seem good,

I was just running from God. And so I kind of, my mind went back to all the

Sunday school lessons I'd heard my whole life when I was a kid. And I went and bought a

Bible. I was just go back to my house. I was living alone. And I'd go back to my house after working and I'd sit down and I'd read the gospels over and over again.

And I met my master reading the gospels by myself. And my life just transformed.

And I turned to Christ and put my faith in him and realized that I had been a rebel and that I desperately needed him.

So somebody told me to read the gospel of John after I got saved. So I was going to a little Baptist church there in Idaho.

And somebody said, you ought to read the gospel of John. So I read John. When I got to John 6, three of the five points of Calvinism are right there in John chapter 6.

That's right. And I just, I realized, okay, so I thought I'd put my faith in Jesus.

And I did, of course. But I realized now that he had been after me. And it wasn't just an autonomous decision, that he had drawn me to himself.

Just as he says there in John 6, 37, that he draws people to himself.

So I just, I began to realize, okay, there's something way bigger here than I thought was going on.

And that was actually awe -inspiring. It made me love God more. And so, yeah.

And, you know, I went to college. Then I ended up going to PRTS later on in life.

And about 25 years ago, I was introduced to the Puritans. And I was, I've been reading the Puritans ever since, my own theological studies.

So it's just been, you know, a wonderful experience. Just having those initial discoveries of the wonders of Christ's love there in the gospel of John, and my

Bible reading, just continually worked out in my life. And just confirmed.

It's been great. Of course, I came out and planted a church in 2006. So I think that probably summarizes it pretty well.

And by the way, I don't know if you're even aware of this, but Chapel Library, which is an excellent resource for phenomenal works by especially, predominantly men of the past, but they do have some contemporary writers.

But they have an excellent booklet. Most of their printed material is in booklet form, extractions from larger books and so on.

But they have a booklet called The Doctrines of Grace in the Gospel of John. And that is a real excellent booklet by R.

Bruce Stewart. And it just shows you how it's amazing that a person who believes in the inerrancy of scripture could read the gospel of John and not see the doctrines of sovereign grace in there.

Amen. So when did you come to realize that you have been given a call by God to join the ministry?

Yeah. Well, I went to college in 95 and heard

Mark Minnick preach. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of Mark Minnick. Yes, I've heard of him. I don't know him though. Yeah, pastor of Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina.

Anyway, phenomenal preacher, absolutely wonderful preacher. And he's very expositional.

He's very Calvinistic. And I just sat under his ministry for several years and grew and realized this is what

I want to do. What he's doing is what I want to do. And of course, my heart was for the Pacific Northwest because that's where I was from.

And so after a while, back in about 2005, I started kind of testing the waters out here, ended up coming out to plant a

Reformed Baptist Church. Praise God. Well, tell us about the main figure in this conversation today, other than the main theme that triumphs overall is, of course, the glorious gospel.

Amen. But tell us about William Strong, about the era that he lived in and why he is such an important figure to you that you would draw wisdom for a theme like this from him specifically.

Yeah, that's a great question. Well, Strong was a member of the Westminster Assembly. And I have, over the years, grown to massively respect the

Westminster Standards. And I have just kind of a general respect for the Puritans.

I feel like they forgot more theology than we presently know. I wanted to be taught by them.

I wanted to kind of sit at their feet, so to speak. When I went to Greenville and found

Mark Minnick's preaching, it was wonderful to just be taught the Word by somebody who knew it better than me. And I think we all have that experience.

We all listen to preaching because we hope that the preacher has insights that we can glean, so that we can know

God better and understand the Word better. And so that's really why I wanted to study the Puritans.

And I ended up studying Strong because I ended up with his book, RHB put out a facsimile of his book,

A Discourse of the Two Covenants. And that's Reformation Heritage Books for our listeners who aren't familiar with that.

Yeah. And so I got my hands on that. I was reading it, and it's absolutely, it seems impenetrable.

It seems like it's impossible to read, but I've always kind of liked the challenge. So I started reading it, and I was blown away with the depth that this guy had.

He just understood the Bible. He was doing exegesis. Sometimes the Puritans get, I think, unfairly accused of cherry -picking

Scripture and just proof -texting in the basest sort of way. And here was

Strong doing some very insightful exegesis, supporting his covenant theology. And so I just fell in love with it.

I mean, I love history, church history. I love the Puritans. Strong lived in the time of the

English Civil War. He came to prominence in the 1640s. He actually preached at, get this,

Westminster Abbey for four years before his death in 1654.

So he was, yeah, he was the preacher at the Abbey. I mean, that's the chief religious building in the

Western world, really. And so he was there. He was the pastor of the independent church that met there.

And so, you know, he was a very significant guy. He also, after the

Restoration, when Charles II came back in 1660, Charles exhumed Strong's body and cast it into a common grave, because Strong had been buried in the

Abbey. And so Charles wanted to deface the memory of a lot of the prominent people during the interregnum, during Cromwell's interregnum.

So Charles, you know, honed in on, one of the people he honed in on was William Strong. And so I thought, okay, here's a guy who literally suffered posthumously, suffered an

English king's act of revenge on him, and yet we know next to nothing about William Strong in our modern day.

What on earth? Here's a guy who was a member of the Westminster Assembly. He had formative influence on the larger catechism.

He wrote this amazing book that is so profound. He was well -known in his day, highly respected in his day.

What happened? And so those are probably all the reasons why, or a lot of the reasons why

I chose him, because when I started reading him, I realized that I'd stumbled across a guy who really had a lot of very important things to say.

Well, you know, the covenant of works is a phrase that brings confusion to a lot of people, even pastors that I know who are outside of the

Reformed faith. They misunderstand what people even would mean by that.

And some have even dared to slander Reformed people as to teach that there was a time when people were saved through obedience and good works.

Obviously that could never be the case since the fall in the garden, man has been totally depraved.

So there's no way that we could ever do anything to please God, even present to him a faith that would save us without first being regenerate.

Amen. Because of our depravity. But please explain this peculiar sounding phrase, the covenant of works.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, there's a couple ways you can understand the phrase, the covenant of works.

You can understand it redemptive historically, and you can understand it kind of abstractly, or as just an idea.

So if you're going to understand it abstractly, I think Strong's got one of the best definitions of it.

He says, quote, the covenant of works is that which teaches justification and life by doing, end quote.

And that really is, you know, it, in a nutshell, if you're talking about it abstractly.

So it's basically, I mean, if you wanted it even more simply than that, you'd just say it's work salvation.

That's what it is. And you're absolutely right in saying that that's impossible because we're totally depraved.

John Ball, John Ball is another one of the Puritans. He said that in the covenant of works,

God covenants with man to give him eternal life upon condition of perfect obedience.

So in the covenant of works, God covenants with man to give him eternal life upon condition of perfect obedience.

So that really fits very well with what Strong is saying, that which teaches justification and life by doing. So you've got two

Puritans saying the same thing there. Watson, Thomas Watson, says a similar thing. And the

Westminster Confession, chapter 7, paragraph 2, it also, it actually goes the redemptive historical route.

So those two Puritans are talking about it kind of abstractly. It's basically, they describe it as that which teaches justification and life by doing.

And then the Westminster Confession discusses it more redemptive historically. And it says that the first covenant made with man was a covenant of works wherein life was promised to Adam.

So there's the historicity, it's where he's talking about the garden now. Life was promised to Adam and in him to his posterity upon condition of perfect and personal obedience.

So the Westminster Confession discusses it redemptive historically, so that it's basically saying

God made a covenant to works with Adam in the garden, but not just with Adam himself, but as a representative of all of his seeds.

So that basically means that everybody is born into this world in the covenant of works, but already condemned under its terms.

So that there's the total depravity thing. So therefore, there's two senses in which the covenant of works still exists, or two senses in which it's abolished,

I should say. It's abolished as to a viable means to eternal life at the fall.

At the fall, when Adam fell, the covenant of works was no longer a way to gain eternal life.

And you can just remember the flaming sword that's set up before the tree of life there at the end of Genesis 3. But this is a key thing for Strong.

He says that the covenant of works remains as a condemning and killing agent in the world.

And it does so, it remains that way for all people who are in Adam. So I think it's a, the whole concept is profound, because what it really does, when you get down to it, is it gives an urgency to be evangelistic.

When you see a lost person, you're seeing somebody who is in relationship with God, but not a good one.

When you see a lost person, you're seeing somebody who's in relationship with God and a relationship of condemnation.

God's wrath kind of almost hangs like a black cloud over them, and they desperately need to be transferred from the first covenant into the covenant of grace.

And that's one of the things I like best about covenant theology is it puts the gospel right dead center at the center of your life and consciousness.

Well, the phrase that you used in the title of your book, yeah, that is really an eye -catching phrase, the backdrop for a glorious gospel is this covenant of works, according to William Strong, of course.

Why is that? Why is the covenant of works a backdrop for a glorious gospel?

Sure, that's a great question, too. Wow, this is awesome. Well, I think that if you're talking about the fact, you know, a lot of people will talk about how we're...

when we're saved, we're saved from the curse of the law, right? So the law, or the curse of the law, becomes kind of a backdrop.

You can think almost of Ephesians chapter 2, where Paul says that we're born dead in sins, wherein in time past we walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit, you know, you remember the passage.

And then it says, but God in his glorious grace has lifted us up out of that situation.

So you can just kind of get the feel for Ephesians chapter 2. And I think that the

Puritans, and William Strong in particular, used the covenant of grace, or excuse me, used the covenant of works in a very similar way to what

Paul's doing in Ephesians 2. In other words, we're born into this world condemned with Adam.

We're, you know, in Adam's fall we sinned all, as the old catechism used to say.

And so there we are, we're born into this world, we're born to die, we're born dying, and that's because we're in this covenant.

And so this idea of the curse of the law is a helpful way to describe the backdrop for the gospel, that we're condemned in Adam.

But saying the covenant of works is that backdrop is a little more, maybe a little more precise in the way you describe it.

Of course, the curse of the law is a precise way of describing it too, but to say covenant means we're in this, it highlights the fact that we're in this relationship with God that is one of condemnation and death if we're in Adam.

And therefore it highlights the fact that this isn't just, you know, some kind of abstract curse or abstract condition.

No, it's a covenant, it's a relationship, it's a bond, a broken one that we're in, and therefore

God's wrath becomes more, I don't want to say justifiable, but it really is brought front and center, the fact that this issue of the wrath of God upon sinners.

We are, I guess if you want to put it simply, we are covenant breakers in Adam.

And that really highlights the need to be transferred from the covenant of works to the covenant of grace.

Now don't you know you're not supposed to bring stuff like that up? You're never going to grow a church if you're talking about wrath and hell and sin.

What's wrong with you? Haven't you watched Joel Osteen for crying out loud? Well that is a very common thought or belief or stance by many people in modern evangelicalism, and I'm not even talking exclusively about the more extreme heretics like Joel Osteen and his followers.

I'm talking about just your average Christian who's conservative, who loves the Bible, who perhaps is not even living in a moral way that we know of.

They may be living in a very godly way, in an obedient way, but people are convinced that we should not be mentioning this from the pulpit or from our evangelism.

I can remember years ago when I was still working for WMCA radio as an advertising agent, and one of my clients was my own church,

Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island in Merrick, New York. That was my church before I moved to Pennsylvania.

I took an excerpt on a sermon on hell from one of my pastors that was a really profound and powerful segment.

We were airing that for quite a while, and we were getting a ton of phone calls from people saying, you don't hear people speak like that anymore.

I've got to come visit your church because I never hear anybody on the radio or TV really addressing this issue.

It was amazing how many people responded so positively to something that is supposed to be keeping people away from church.

Yeah, and I think when you open yourself up to the law, and when the

Spirit works on a person's heart, on an unbeliever's heart, and they suddenly realize their condemned state and the fact that God's wrath hangs over them, then it causes them, when they see the gospel, to really embrace it with their whole heart, and it makes an impact in their heart and in their mind and their emotions.

They become passionate about Christ. And so to downplay wrath and the curse of the law and the covenant of works is to kind of make pablum out of the gospel.

We've got to recover this. Yeah, and it diminishes when you remove the bad news from the good news, it removes or diminishes or dulls or really just makes impotent what good news it really is.

Because if you don't know the horrible consequences to rejecting the good news, you're really never going to appreciate the good news at all.

That's so true, man. That is so true. Having been a pastor for 14 years now,

I would say that one of the most discouraging things about our modern scene in, you know,

American Christianity is the fact that the good news doesn't make an impact on people.

People can look at the most glorious things about God and about Christ and about salvation and just kind of blink at it and not be moved.

And I think it's because of this. They don't realize, if they are saved, they don't realize what they were saved from.

Or maybe they aren't saved and they simply have never come under conviction of sin. Well, we're going to our first station break, and if anybody would like to join us on the air, the question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

And as always, please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Don't go away. We'll be right back with more of our guest Tom Parr. We are excited to announce another new member of the

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And don't forget folks, for all your gift -giving needs for upcoming special events and holidays like Father's Day, like birthdays, wedding anniversaries, graduation gifts, back -to -school gifts, bereavement gifts, even stocking up early for Christmas gifts, please go to solid -ground -books .com

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They are a primary financial supporter of this broadcast, and without them, barring a miracle of God, I don't think that we would have a program any longer.

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and buy books for all of your loved ones, whether they are Christian or not, because remember, although you'll be edifying greatly your brothers and sisters in Christ through books from Solid Ground Christian Books, you may also lead a lost person to Christ through the gospel found within the pages of these great works from the past and present.

So remember, solid -ground -books .com, and always remember to tell them that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

And if you've just tuned in, our guest today on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio is Thomas Parr, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church, a

Reformed Baptist congregation in Anacortes, Washington, and we are discussing his book,

Backdrop for a Glorious Gospel, the Covenant of Works, according to William Strong, a book published by Reformation Heritage Books, also a very trustworthy publisher that you can always rely upon for the finest in Christian literature.

And if you have a question, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

If death is the curse of the first covenant, the covenant of works, why do we die now?

Why do we die all these years later in the 21st century, and why will we always die until Christ returns?

That's a great question. Well, I think, in fact, there's a point in Strong's book where he asks, are

Christians under the covenant of grace and under the covenant of works at the same time? And his answer to that is no,

Christians are in the covenant of grace, praise God. And Jesus said that when we die, we won't even see death.

So I guess, really, the answer to the question is we don't. Christians don't, because there are three sorts of death.

There's physical death, there's spiritual death, and there's eternal death. And when we become

Christians, we're no longer spiritually dead. And we're not going to face eternal death, thank

God. And we will face physical death, unless the

Lord comes back first. But we are going to face physical death, but that's going to be reversed.

So I guess I would say that, in the most important sense, we aren't dead, and we don't face it, thank

God. But we will face physical death, but that has already been, you know,

God's already planned to reverse it, and we can look forward to our resurrection body. So I think there's something profound and beautiful about the fact that even though death still does hold sway over Christians, in a sense, it doesn't, in another sense, but in the most important sense.

And this is one thing that's very mind -boggling. I can't understand, other than the depravity of man being at the root of this, but it still is strange, even knowing that this is coming from a depraved heart and mind.

Why do people in Adam prefer the First Covenant, the Covenant of Word? Oh, wow, that's a great question.

Strong spends a lot of time on that. And I think if you were to get to, if you wanted to put it in the most simple way possible, they are trying to uphold their own righteousness.

They are working very hard to, I guess a modern phrase that people use a lot these days is virtue signaling.

And a person in Adam is committed to that because he has to appear to be righteous to other people.

And that matters deeply to them. And so their whole life, really, is spent trying to convince other people how great they are, to get pats on the back.

And so there's a whole, and Strong gets into this in his book, there's a whole psychology to being in the

Covenant of Works. And it's one where you're, you know, Paul describes the Pharisees as they've rejected the right, in Romans chapter 10, they've rejected the righteousness of God, they're trying to establish their own righteousness.

And that is why they prefer it. They don't want to have to accept that they are totally depraved.

They don't want to have to accept that they're condemned. Now, one case that would make it stranger, or perhaps harder to make that point, do people who are lost, who are professing

Christians, who believe in the opposite of works righteousness, which is a works righteousness is a damning heresy, but on the opposite end of the spectrum, is those that believe in licentiousness, not barring you from heaven, they believe they are against the

Lordship, the necessity of embracing the Lordship of Christ there, they militate against the necessity of repentance.

And they militate against a good tree bearing good fruit that if we are truly justified by faith alone, even though we are justified by grace through faith alone, we will do good works.

It's not a question, it's not a debatable issue. It's not some truly saved people will do good works and some won't.

Everyone who is truly born again will produce good works, not as a means to pleasing

God and entering heaven and satisfying his wrath, but just as an evidence that they are saved.

Why do people in that category of Christianity, and I'm not saying that every single person who is wrong theologically on this,

I'm not saying that there are many people at Dallas Theological Seminary who on paper believe these things, or at least

I don't know how popular that is today there, but they were at one time the headquarters of militating against Lordship Salvation.

But for those who are lost who believe that, why would they be in the category of actually preferring the first covenant?

Yeah, wow, that's great. Well, what you're talking about is what people might call cheap grace, or the

Puritans would have called antinomianism, people who are against the law. And I would say that there is a very strong but subtle interaction between legalism and antinomianism.

And I think people pendulum swing back and forth between them. People who are legalists oftentimes will leap off into antinomianism at points where it's convenient for them, and vice versa.

In fact, I've met some pretty serious antinomians, or people who have those tendencies.

And they will talk very legal at certain points in their discussion.

What they don't want, you know, they're not so much opposed to law. In fact, they can be very proud about their own goodness.

But they just don't want God's law, and they particularly don't like the idea that God's law is still an authority.

And so I think that even antinomians are still thinking in terms of their own goodness, inherent goodness.

And, you know, as Strong talks about how subtle a works orientation can be, like he'll say, he'll even say things like this.

He'll say, if you're a Christian, and let me just repeat this to anybody who's listening here, let me just directly address the audience here.

This is directly from Strong, and he's talking about how subtle a works orientation can be. And he basically says, if you think that your own personal approach to God is basically, if your conception of it, your relationship with God, isn't consciously dependent upon the mediator,

Jesus Christ. In other words, if you don't feel the need for a mediator, if you do a good work and you expect it to be accepted before God simply because you did it, that's the covenant.

That is a mentality that is part and parcel with the covenant of works. Because what does it mean to be in the covenant of grace except to recognize we are totally depraved, we have no hope in that covenant, there's no hope of works righteousness, there's nothing in my hand

I bring but simply to the cross I claim, and so I'm going to God through a mediator.

There is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. So I would just say that people who are in, people who are antinomians, they probably don't recognize the fact that they are, they still are in that, you know, many of them

I should say, still are in that covenant of works. And if they would really look at their hearts, they'd see that they really still are upholding their own righteousness and trying to establish it just according to their own terms, not

God's terms. By the way, we have a listener, Scoby from Oak Harbor, Washington, who says that he's thrilled that you're on the show today.

Well, tell him hi for me, he's a great guy. I will. And well, he hopefully heard you, just say it now.

We're going to go to our midway break right now. The midway break is our longer than normal break because Grace Life Radio in Lake City, Florida, who airs this program twice a day in a pre -recorded format, on morning drive and in the evening, they require of us a longer break in the middle of the show because in order to be faithful to FCC regulations, they have to localize this show to Lake City, Florida with their own public service announcements and other things they broadcast that localize the show to Lake City, Florida.

So please be patient with us as we take this longer than normal break and use the time wisely. Please write down information provided by our advertisers so that you can more frequently and successfully patronize them, which means they will more than likely stick around as our advertisers.

And that means that hopefully we will remain on the air for a longer future because we depend upon our advertisers and the finances that come through them to exist.

So please write down that information from as much of the advertising you hear as possible and also write down a question or two to our guest today,

Tom Parr, and send it to chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Don't go away. We're going to be right back with Thomas Parr and our discussion on Backdrop for a

Glorious Gospel of the Covenant of Works, according to William Strong, after these messages from our sponsors.

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In Psalm 139 verse 14, the psalmist offers praise to the Lord like this,

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Before we return to Thomas Parr, to continue discussing

Backdrop for a Glorious Gospel, the Covenant of Works, according to William Strong, I have just a few very important announcements to make.

First of all, the third day of our three -day debate between full

Preterist Don K. Preston and former full Preterist Samuel M.

Frost is taking place tomorrow. That's Friday the 5th of June, 4 to 6 p .m.

Eastern Time, right here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio. And this program, after our debaters give a recap of the previous two days of the debate, the previous two days, by the way, were last

Thursday and Friday, and if you want to hear those recordings, they are now posted on ironsharpenzionradio .com

in the past shows podcast section. But tomorrow our debaters will do a fairly brief recap of those two days, and then the majority of time that we will spend for the remainder of those two hours will be solely on audience questions, because we hardly had any time to take a significant number of questions the last two days, because our debaters had so much they needed to say.

So hopefully you will be able to get your questions squeezed into the list of many that we've already got pouring in.

And so that is the debate on full Preterism, Friday, June 5th, right here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

And just a brief definition for those who don't understand or never heard that phrase,

Full Preterism, it's also known as Hyper Preterism, and it's known by many other labels, but it is a view that all of the prophecies of the

New Testament have been fulfilled already on A .D. 70, and that would even include the return of Christ, there is no future return of Christ according to these folks, and there is no future bodily resurrection of the dead either.

And there are some other things that may blow your mind that they believe that are outside of historic

Christianity, especially Biblically Orthodox Christianity, including

Don K. Preston's belief that Jesus Christ no longer has a physical body, but that's just a few of many of the things they believe that Sam Frost, who once believed those things as well, will seek to expose his error tomorrow, and we hope that you tune in.

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So, I'm asking you to please help us make up for that lost income, and I thank all of you who have already been doing that.

There are so many of you that I wish I could get a chance to meet all of you face to face because you've been such an important blessing in my life, the way you have demonstrated generosity in your giving to this program.

Some of you loyal, faithful givers every month, and some of you, as one woman in Austin, Texas is, that I've never heard from before who gave a gift so large that it broke all donation records to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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Thank you so much. I'll never be able to adequately thank you. Also, folks, if you are not a member of a local

Bible -believing church and you're having a hard time finding a church where you live anywhere in the world,

I have lists of biblically faithful churches all over the planet Earth, and I've already helped many people in this audience find churches near where they live, and many of them have joined these churches, many of them have referred them to other folks that they know who need churches, and sometimes they visit these churches on vacation.

But if you need a church for any reason, send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail dot com and put

I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address where you can send in a question for Thomas Parr to answer on the backdrop for a glorious gospel, the covenant of works according to William Strong, and our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

chrisarnson at gmail dot com, and because of the fact that Tom is a Reformed Baptist pastor, we will also broaden the scope of questions that you can ask theologically, so you don't have to be exactly on topic to ask a question.

We just prefer that. And before I even go to an audience question of Pastor Parr, I just want to read an endorsement from someone who is one of my favorite guests here on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

I'm speaking of Dr. Michael A .G. Haken, and he says, Up until the

Restoration, William Strong's grave was in Westminster Abbey. But with the return of Charles II, his body was disinterred and unceremoniously dumped into the obscurity of a mass grave.

This small fact well illustrates the way that Strong, once influential enough to be buried in the

Capitol's leading church, has disappeared beneath the soil of history. This work by Tom Parr helps recover not only

Strong's memory, but also his thinking on Covenant theology in his

Magnum Opus. This is not only a fresh study, but one that proves to be vital for understanding the way that the

Covenant is threaded through the entire warp and woof of Puritan thinking.

Once again, that's Dr. Michael A .G. Haken, Chair and Professor of History at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

And I do love that brother and look forward to his return to the show. We have a question from John in Bangor, Maine.

And John states that I know of Reformed Baptists who believe that the

Covenant between the Nation of Israel and God in the Old Testament was a covenant of works, but it was not salvific.

It was not permanent. It was only a temporary and earthly covenant, which is why if you disobeyed the laws of the

Old Covenant, you were excommunicated from the called -out

Israel and possibly could even be executed. Do you disagree with this view?

Well, that's a great question and a very informed question. Not necessarily.

I would say that the situation is far more nuanced than that particular view. That is a common

Reformed Baptist view. Not all Reformed Baptists hold to it, but many do. I would just say that there was typological significance to the institutions in ancient

Israel. For example, the Temple and all the sacrifices that went on there.

And that people in the Old Testament, those upon whom the Spirit moved, were aware of the fact that those institutions were pointing forward for them to a greater reality.

In other words, believers like David, Moses himself, believers in the

Old Testament were looking forward to Christ, and they knew that a lot of these institutions were pointing towards Christ, just like the

New Testament tells us they do. And so, no, I don't think that the

Mosaic Covenant was purely a political, earthly thing. I think that it had that side to it.

Yes, definitely, it had that side to it. But it also was a spiritual covenant, and that it was offering Christ to believers on whom the

Spirit moved. So, I would say that, yeah, I mean, I agree in essence with what they're saying, but I guess

I would disagree if they said that it was exclusively only a this world covenant. Well, thanks,

John. Please give us your full mailing address in Bangor, Maine, because, guess what? You have won a free copy of Tom Parr's latest book,

Backdrop for a Glorious Gospel, The Covenant of Works, according to William Strong. And we thank our friends at Reformation Heritage Books for their generosity in providing these giveaway copies to listeners with questions.

We also want to thank Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com. We'll be the ones mailing these copies out to you at no expense to you or to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Our next listener is Grady in Asheboro, North Carolina, another very faithful listener to this program and also a very generous supporter financially of this program.

And Grady says, Greetings Brothers Chris and Tom. If I'm understanding you, this is the theology that the

Puritans taught, which is actually what our Lord Jesus said when He stated in Matthew chapter 5 verse 17 that He came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it.

It's also what is taught through the Holy Scriptures and what Jonathan Edwards was trying to get people to see in his message,

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, where under God's wrath, unless we repent from our sins, turn to Christ and through grace by faith follow

Him in obedience to His Word. This is

God's covenant works, right? So do you agree with that statement?

Um, I think so. I think so. I would just say that if you wanted to find what the covenant of works is,

I would stick with Strong's definition. You know, he just said that it's that which teaches justification and life by doing.

So the covenant of works is works righteousness. So if somebody came along and said today, you need to obey to be saved, that's heresy, that's wrong.

We can't because we're under the broken covenant of works. Strong talks about how wrong it is to try to patch up the broken covenant.

It's broken and only brings condemnation. So yeah, the law, if you're an unbeliever and you come into contact with the law, then you should feel the wrath of God coming near because you're in Adam and the law is only going to condemn you.

But that if the Spirit moves upon you by God's grace, that should drive you to Jesus Christ because there's a second covenant and you need grace in Christ to be saved from your sins.

We have, oh thanks Grady, and make sure we have your full mailing address in Ashboro, North Carolina because you've won a free copy of Pastor Thomas's book as well.

We have RJ in White Plains, New York who says,

I have heard some dispensationalists, not all, I don't want to broad brush, but I've heard some dispensationalists teach that during the great tribulation, which they view as a future event, that God's plan of salvation after the rapture will be a works righteousness salvation.

Can we say that anyone teaching this is a heretic even though they believe that before that and after that it is purely of grace through faith alone?

Wow. Well, one of the things I've realized is about, that's quite a question.

One of the things I've realized about studying dispensationalism is that there's been a lot of different sorts of dispensationalism.

So let's just say, I guess I would just prefer to set aside that term and deal with the particular issue and that is,

I would say that it's wrong anytime after the fall to say that anybody is saved by their works.

So yes, I would say it's wrong. Now, when you say that before the fall, this is an acceptable view to have, could we actually say that Adam and Eve were saved by their obedience and good works?

Because they were not, they were not lost. They were created perfect and they were sinless.

They obviously did not yet have sin, which means that they were not like us who had to inherit it.

They were created good. So isn't it true that they became lost rather than were lost needing to be saved through their obedience?

Yeah, they had a provisional sort of righteousness when they were made. It was a true genuine goodness, but it was provisional in the sense that it was mutable.

It could be lost, depending on what they chose to do about God's command.

So yeah, they were given a covenant of works.

Some of the Puritans called it a covenant of life because they were focused on the reward. So if you called it a covenant of life, you'd be focusing on the fact that it offered life by works.

And if you call it a covenant of works, then you'd be focusing on the condition more, or the stipulation more.

So yeah, they were definitely created good, but mutably good, depending on what they did there in that kind of probationary time there in the garden.

But once they fell, I just love how Genesis 3 works. If you read through Genesis 3, you'll see that God gives

Genesis 3 15, the promise about the seed of the woman who would come and crush the serpent's head, that glorious promise.

He gave that promise before he even spoke in words of judgment to the man and the woman.

So it's this remarkable thing that immediately upon the fall, God began preaching grace in Christ.

So he began giving intimations and hints of that glorious gospel, that glorious covenant of grace in Christ.

So people who, you know, even Adam and Eve, though they were given that covenant of works, but they fell, and therefore they broke it and brought themselves and all of us with them into condemnation.

Instantly, God began offering them hope in Christ. And we have to go to our final break right now.

It'll be a lot shorter than the last ones. So please, if you intend to send in a question, do it rather quickly because we're rapidly running out of time.

We have a little less than a half hour left in the show. So send those emails to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And as always, give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Don't go away.

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Spread the word about firstloveradio .org. Welcome back.

This is Chris Arnzen, and if you've just tuned us in, our guest today for the entire program has been and will continue to be

Thomas Parr, who is pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church, a Reformed Baptist congregation in Anacortes, Washington, and he is contributing editor to the

Lexham Context Commentary and author of the volume on the

Gospel of Mark in that series. Today we are discussing his book Backdrop for a Glorious Gospel, the

Covenant of Works, according to William Strong. Now, doing some recap, how is sin irritated by the law?

That's an excellent question. Strong really hones in on that in one of the chapters in the book.

He uses Romans 7 as his touchstone passage to discuss it.

Romans 7 basically says that when we were in the flesh, the law stirred up sin in our hearts, and I think that's

Romans 7 .4 or maybe 7 .5. But so Strong talks about that.

He says that people who are unbelievers, when they come into contact with the law, the law, because it's written on our hearts, you know,

God, it's God's law, it has a lordly aspect to it, and therefore it comes with strength to us.

In other words, we sense powerfully in our own souls an urgency to keep these laws.

I mean, we want to do right. There's a part of us that wants to do right even when we're fallen, and that shows in our conscience how strong it can be.

But what happens is when we come into contact with the law, our fallen nature, our total depravity responds to it by, number one, by wanting to obey it and condemning ourselves when we don't obey it, but then not wanting to obey it because we want our own freedoms.

We want to do what we want to do, and we start hating it. And what ends up happening is sin actually gets irritated or exacerbated in our lives when we come into contact with God's commandments.

And along with that comes a soul -destroying hypocrisy, too, because even as we, you know, try to find loopholes for the flesh to operate, we don't want to appear bad, and so we, you know, lacquer on layers of whitewash so that we become pharisaical hypocrites with our cup that's filthy inside but all nice on the outside.

So it really is an amazing read. When you read too strong on this, it's shocking and kind of horrifying because he has such,

I don't know, just insight into fallen human nature. And, you know, I think he's really just hitting the nail on the head.

I think you can see this sort of thing throughout human, fallen human society, where there's a soul -destroying hypocrisy that comes along with an actual increase of sin when people take the law seriously.

We have Ronald in eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, who says, I have heard many

Christians, even some Calvinists, say that fear of hell is not what the

Bible teaches as the main way we are compelled to follow Christ, but the love of Christ itself is what compels us.

How do you respond to this? Yeah, it's good. Well, I think, certainly, absolutely, after we're believers, perfect love casts out fear, 1

John chapter 4. And I think that's utterly crucial to get to the center of our being.

When we're, you know, if a person has been condemned by the law and seen the wrath of God and fled to Christ and found refuge in Christ, I think one of the most important things that must happen as a

Christian grows is to get to the point where he feels safe in God's hand, from whom, from whose hand no one can pluck him, and he feels that, and he senses it, and he just, it's like a marinade.

He marinades himself in it, and it just permeates his soul so that he knows that he is

God's child. The Spirit witnesses in his heart that he is a child of God. He knows because he sees the fruits of the

Spirit in his life that only the Spirit can produce, and he knows because he's clinging to the sacrifice of Christ as his only hope for salvation.

And so he has this massive sense of assurance and of the love of God for him in his heart, and that's where, really, all of us as Christians need to get to.

We need to get to the point where we are convinced that God has loved us from before the foundation of the world, and that he brought

Christ into the world to pay the penalty for our sins, and then he gave us faith to believe the gospel in our own personal history, and now he's going to continue that good work all the way to the end, to the day of Christ.

So yeah, I totally think that for Christians it's utterly crucial to serve God out of love, deep and passionate love and joy, without fear.

And so I think that you're, you know, the fellow who wrote that question is really, I think, hitting a nail on the head.

That's where we all need to be, where we all need to be. It's an exciting thing to know that God wants us to serve the

Lord with joy. Well, thank you, Ronald, and you have also won a free copy of Backdrop for a

Glorious Gospel, so please make sure we have your full mailing address in eastern

Suffolk County, Long Island. Tell us how all those in Christ are transferred from the

New Covenant. Or from the First Covenant, right. Right, I'm sorry,

First Covenant. Yeah, well, you know, Strong focuses on Colossians chapter 1, where it says that we've been transferred, or the

King James is translated, but the idea is transferral. We've been transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God's dear

Son, and Strong does a lot of really phenomenal exegesis showing that that's talking about transferral of covenants, and it's remarkable because the passage itself says the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of God's dear

Son, and Strong points out, I think very well, that the kingdom of darkness, being in the kingdom of darkness is basically being under Satan's thumb, so to speak, in the covenant of works, where Satan, as an accuser, presses

God's law against oneself. Again, I mean against one, against the person in that covenant, and so to be transferred out of that power of darkness into the kingdom of God's dear

Son is the transferral that he's talking about there, that Strong's talking about, and so you're literally taken out of the

Old Covenant and placed in the New. You're taken out of the covenant of works and placed in the covenant of grace, and you no longer have

Satan as your master who's pressing God's law against you at God's bar, and now you're in Christ who is your intercessor and who is your advocate.

It's just a beautiful thing. So if you're a believer in Christ, it's something that you can just praise

God for every day of your life, that you were in this terrible state in Adam, but now in Christ, it's completely opposite state, opposite condition.

So yeah, that's another great theme in Strong. We have

Susan Margaret from Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, can we not convey the idea to the lost that they are sinners because of what they have violated, which is clearly taught in the

New Testament, rather than having to use the law from the

Old Covenant, the Decalogue, to do so? Well, you know, that's an interesting question, and it raises all sorts of thoughts in my mind.

It probably isn't a good idea to start saying, thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not, you know, just start listing commandments.

But I think that because the law is written on people's hearts, we do have some common ground with them, even though they suppress the truth of unrighteousness, as the

Bible teaches in Romans 1. So I think that if we talk, if we have a good enough relationship with a lost person where we can actually talk about our consciences, where we can actually talk about how, you know, just the concept of guilt, the moment we start talking about our consciences and standards that we have for ourselves that come from God's law and maybe past experiences where we've blown it and where we've sinned, we're in that realm already.

The moment we start talking about that, we're in that realm. We don't have to put it in biblical language or language that's going to be off -putting in any way, shape, or form.

But yeah, I definitely think we can talk about the law without actually quoting awkward -sounding statements.

And another thing, too, is anytime we talk about a virtue, like, I can't read 1 Corinthians 13 without instantly being convicted of my own lack of love.

I mean, Paul says, love is patient, love is kind, it does not boast, and so on. And the moment I start reading that or even thinking about it,

I think, okay, I'm not patient enough. I need to learn how to love better.

And see, that's, even though we're talking about a positive virtue, love, the flip side of it is the law.

I mean, that's the law. Love is patient. And so we can talk about the law in very positive ways, like, you know, just talking about love is patient, love is kind.

So yeah, I think that it's definitely, we definitely need to talk about the law with unbelievers. We definitely need to talk about guilt.

We need to talk about condemnation. But we can, I think we can do it in ways that they totally, perfectly understand.

Well, Susan Margaret, you have also won a free copy of the book we are addressing, Backdrop for a

Glorious Gospel. So make sure we have your mailing address. And one thing

I wanted to ask myself is that if the law as a covenant is abolished to all in Christ, why do we perpetuate using the law?

We use it as a law. We use the law to see where we have transgressed from obedience to God.

We use the law in pointing out to people that they are sinners. Why is the law still a part of our vocabulary in life?

And of course, many among us are even Sabbatarian, so they're even obeying the law to keep his day holy.

So why is it that this is a perpetual theme within the life of many

Reformed Christians and others, if the law as a covenant is abolished? That's a phenomenal question.

Yeah, well, it really just comes down to Calvin's third use of the law. I think

Samuel Bolton, the Puritan, said that the law in its condemnation drives us to Christ, who gives us the

Spirit and sends us back to the law, empowered now to obey it. And so I think that quote from Bolton is just golden.

I think it's found in his book, The True Bounds of Christian Freedom. It's a phenomenal Puritan paperback from Banner of Truth. Anyway, so yeah, that's it.

I think that the issue is that we're free from the law as condemnation, and so we're free from it as a covenant of condemnation.

Then God, in the covenants of grace, gives us empowerment through the

Holy Spirit, through our union with Christ, in order to obey the law. And yet we can do it completely differently now, because now that we're in Christ, we don't need to fear that if we blow it or if we fall short, which we inevitably will because there's no perfection found in this life, we can know that Christ's blood covers us and that we're not operating under the rigor that people operate under in the old covenant.

In the new covenant, in the covenant of grace, there's magnanimity. He accepts our imperfect service because of our accepted persons in Christ, and that is such a glorious concept.

So therefore, to all in Christ, the first covenant serves the second.

Amen. There you go. You're following the table of contents of the book. I've got you. Well, obviously this is a good sequel.

Yes. And if you could, Joel Beeky, who's the founder of this publisher,

Reformation Heritage Books, he is known for being a lover of, and being passionate about, and being personally personally committed to what is known as experimental covenant theology, experimental

Calvinism, also known as experiential Calvinism.

Can you please explain what this is and why it's so important? Yeah. Well, there's a tendency in anybody who thinks deeply about theology to kind of make it abstract and to kind of lose touch with the fact that when we are talking theology, we're talking thoughts about God and whom we are in a relationship, or with whom we're in a relationship.

And so Dr. Beeky is one of my favorite people because he's so full of joy, and I just love that.

But he is so focused on helping people to see that theology is not, they're not just ideas, they are of course, but that we need to take these ideas and experience them in our souls, and use them as fodder for joy, use them in relationship with God in prayer, and they should dramatically affect our lives.

It's really more than just saying we need to apply principles in the Bible or apply theology.

It's more than that. It needs to affect our emotional state, our psychological state, our actions. It needs to be like, as St.

Clair Ferguson puts it, a tincture that takes the metallic hardness out of our souls and puts a sweetness there.

I mean, it really is a full -bodied view of how theology should affect all of life.

Well, we are out of time, and I want to make sure that our listeners have all of the contact information that they need for you.

First of all, the Cornerstone Baptist Church of Anacortes, Washington, and I probably mispronounced that city at least 10 times during this broadcast.

It's Anacortes. Anacortes. That website is cornerstoneanacortes .com,

and Anacortes is spelt A -N -A -C -O -R -T -E -S, cornerstoneanacortes .com.

And let's not forget about our dear friends at Reformation Heritage Books who provided us with the free giveaway copies of your book today.

Their website is heritagebooks .org, heritagebooks .org, and I have a request for you, or from you, or no, for you.

I'm not meaning you, Tom, I'm talking about the audience. When you're purchasing this book and any book by Reformation Heritage Books, if you could, first go to heritagebooks .org,

look for all the things that you want to buy, and then purchase them from cvbbs .com, who is actually a sponsor of this program, and they both win in that way, because cvbbs .com

has to purchase the books from Reformation Heritage Books anyway. So please first go to heritagebooks .org,

and then purchase the books from cvbbs .com. But it's been a joy having you on the program for the first time, and I can already tell that you're a perfect match for this show, and I would love to have you return in the future, and I hope that all of you tune in tomorrow for day number three of the debate on full preterism between Don K.

Preston and Samuel Frost, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. Amen. Thank you so much.